Disney Buys Marvel

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The Magic Kingdom welcomes the House of Ideas.

By IGN Staff

In a deal that combines two of entertainment's most popular brands, The Walt Disney Company announced its agreement to acquire Marvel Entertainment and its over 5000 characters in a stock and cash transaction. Marvel shareholders will receive $30 and 0.745 Disney shares for each share of stock they own. This brings the total price per share to approximately $50, making the total value of the deal around $4 billion.

IGN's editorial teams have assembled a variety of editorials analyzing the implications of the possible merger. If you want all of the latest news first, read below the navigation graphic and then click over to our various features.

Disney President and CEO Robert A. Iger explains:

"This transaction combines Marvel's strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney's creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories. Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney."

Ike Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel, adds:

"Disney is the perfect home for Marvel's fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses. This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney's tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world."

Perlmutter will continue to oversee Marvel's properties and will "work directly with Disney's global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel's properties.

The deal has been approved by each company's board of directors but is still waiting for the approval of Marvel shareholders and anti-trust clearance.

The intersection of these two brands is sure to have a tremendous impact across all fields of entertainment given the recent success of the Marvel brand in movies and video games. It's unlikely that the deal with affect the publishing status of the Paramount movies or Activision games, but the status of the Marvel presence at Universal's theme park is unclear.

UPDATE: More details were revealed in an investor call this morning. It was announced that Disney XD is likely to be the new home for Marvel-related TV projects. Representatives on the call praised Marvel's existing licensing deals, saying that Marvel has "done a good job at keeping attractive deals in place" and suggested that "those deals stay in place." Deals for Fox's Fantastic Four, Sony's Spider-Man and Paramount's Iron Man won't be affected in the short term but according to Disney representatives, "it would be clearly be more attractive to us if, over time, we became the sole distributor of these films." Still, added Iger, "If it's not broke..."

More interestingly, Disney has reported lots of enthusiasm in internal talks between Pixar and Marvel. The company indicated that co-branding of properties isn't likely but that the two groups are looking "very expansively at all the opportunities."

On the game's front, Disney again praised Marvel's "smart licensing agreements with some of the best videogame manufacturers in the business" and offered assurances that games based on Marvel properties will not be exclusively created by Disney. In evaluating "what's best for the company" Disney won't "rule out the possibilities of a blend of licensed games as well as self-produced and self-distributed" titles.

UPDATE TWO: As expected, Disney is making the rounds on a variety of news outlets to discuss the upcoming deal. Disney CEO Bob Iger did a ten minute television interview on CNBC earlier today, which is also in circulation on MSNBC.com. Though much was merely a repeat of previously issued statements, Iger did have this to say on the concept of integrating Disney and Marvel brands for projects: "The intention is not to rebrand Marvel [as] Disney, in fact the opposite - to really emphasize the Marvel brand and to use Marvel where we can on Disney platforms and in Disney places to grow both businesses."

When CNBC asked about theme park plans, Iger added: "Marvel characters have already proved strong when it comes to theme park attraction. We believe there are a lot of opportunities around the world. Not in every one of our parks, because there are existing agreements that we obviously have to honor, but in a number of places for us to use the Marvel characters to basically help us grow our theme park business and better entertain people."

Iger also used some interesting language during his interview. Though we aren't sure how much can be read into this, the Disney exec did say that existing deals regarding films and videogames will "largely stay in place." Does this mean the company is contemplating not renewing certain arrangements? Could be. "As those deals near expiration, [Disney has] an opportunity to weigh whether it makes sense to extend deals with third parties under licensing circumstances - enabling them to invest their capital and to throw off licensing revenue to us, or to vertically integrate and distribute that product on our own. We'll make those decisions as they come up. But there is no doubt there are deals in place already. Those were fully factored into our evaluation of Marvel when we decided to make this deal."

For more on the implications of the Disney/Marvel merger, check out more of IGN's coverage through the below links: